From a Cleveland Teenager to No. 1: The Road to Street Fighter
Street Fighter, the martial arts comedy directed by Kitao Sakurai, was the top movie in America at the time of a profile of him published by The Hollywood Reporter on 21 October 2026.
The film was reported to be opening in theatres on 16 October. Sakurai co-wrote the script with T. J. Fixman, according to the film's Wikipedia entry. Back in May 2025, Jason Momoa and Noah Centineo were reported to be in talks for the film, which had already been announced with Sakurai in the director's chair.
His route to the director's chair started well before that. As a teenage actor based in Cleveland, he played a tough-guy enforcer in a blue Highlands Clamdiggers jersey in Kevin Smith's 1999 film Dogma. Programming at the Cleveland Cinematheque, including Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Robert Altman films, got him thinking about working behind the camera.
He dropped out of college and moved to New York at 19 to make independent films. He worked as a music video cinematographer and, in the mid-2000s, met the comedian Eric André on a shoot. Together they built a proof of concept for a show that became The Eric Andre Show. Networks passed on it again and again. Adult Swim picked it up in 2010, after the pair had planned to release it on YouTube.
By the time the Hollywood Reporter profile was written, the series had produced 60 episodes, several specials and an Emmy win. Sakurai's feature debut came in 2010 with Aardvark, a fictional take on the real friendship between Larry Lewis Jr., a blind recovering alcoholic, and Darren Branch, a jiu-jitsu instructor.
His second feature, Bad Trip, reunited him with André and also starred Lil Rel Howery. Sakurai co-wrote and directed it. The film's path to audiences was anything but smooth. It was first slated for a 2019 theatrical release through MGM's Orion Pictures, then moved to 2020 with a South by Southwest premiere set for March of that year. The pandemic derailed those plans. In the end, Amazon Prime Video accidentally made the film available on its platform, and Netflix acquired it for a 2021 streaming release, the Hollywood Reporter reported.
Few directors have a film that went from a festival slot to a streaming surprise and then to a top spot at the cinema. What stands out in Sakurai's story is how often a project changed hands, and how often it had to find another way to reach people. Street Fighter is now the film in cinemas, and its box-office run will be measured in the weeks ahead.
